The Prosperous Thief (33 page)

With bloodshed and brutality on every continent of the world, the Culture and Identity Studies Centre was bursting its seams. But worse than the huge classes, even worse than collegiate competition for top victim status, was the loss of integrity which had given rise to departments like his in the first place. When a new professorial position to be occupied by Raphe was approved earlier in the year, it was endowed by an armaments company. Raphe was being paid in profits from nuclear weapons!

No doubt about it, definitely a B for work. And a B for love, too, although he desperately hoped this had changed with Juno. But before he met her, serial partners, none of them lasting longer than five years, and among them not one Jewish girlfriend.

‘You wouldn’t want any competition for your Holocaust,’ Juno said.

A B in all aspects of life, although after learning about Henry Lewin he was heading towards an A in violence. He, Raphe Carter, who not so long ago had been a man whose violent impulses extended no further than squashing a mosquito, a man who felt protected by the benign presence of his beloved grandfather, now understood how men could hurl their children at walls, bash their wives senseless, and kick their animals to death, how the anger could build until you had no option but to let it out. Raphe could understand this and it terrified him. And it was getting worse; his imagination without the restraints of reality was making freedom of movement a dangerous privilege – witness the event with the Australians on the train.

And then his mother died, far too young like most members of his family, and no one to blame this time. He was already filled with anger over Henry Lewin and now with grief as well. Juno did her best, but in the end she ran out of patience. Six months after his mother’s death, Juno suggested they take a break.

‘You need to temper all this emotion,’ she said.‘Or rather, you need to temper the rage. I can cope with the grief.’

Juno, Juno, Juno. He couldn’t bear to think of life without her. He pushed Henry Lewin out of his thoughts, he tried to silence his grandfather’s demands, and he turned all his attention to Juno. They went to concerts and the theatre, they had a weekend away at the beach, they made love more often and with much the same vigour as they used to. And when a bequest arrived at the college specifically tagged for Holocaust teaching, even work started to look better.

One evening at the end of a particularly enjoyable dinner, Raphe poured a sauterne and the two of them sat at the table surrounded by maps, planning their first trip to Europe together. Germany was on the proposed itinerary.

‘And you’ll show me Krefeld,’ Juno said. ‘It’ll be different, less disturbing, seeing it with me.’

Raphe, wrapped in the mellowness of the evening, answered without thinking: he’d never visited Krefeld before, he said, nor Düsseldorf for that matter. He’d always imagined his grandparents in Berlin – he had visited there twice – and in various concentration camps – Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald had each received a visit.

Juno was appalled. ‘It’s as if you’ve let the Nazi years erase all the life which came before.’ She found it macabre that the regime which had killed his grandparents was now being given exclusive licence to define them.‘Perhaps you Jews ought to excavate a little deeper.’ Her whole pose was a mix of bewilderment and derision. ‘Where do you think African-Americans would be if we’d looked no further than slavery?’

All mellowness was gone as Raphe tried to explain his position, how despite his efforts the Holocaust seemed to stand like an impenetrable barrier between him and his grandparents’ early life. How with only a handful of objects from that life remaining, the public knowledge – history – had an uninterrupted opportunity to dominate.

Then there was the not inconsiderable matter of interest, although he would never admit this to Juno. But the fact of the matter was he was much more interested in his grandparents’ wartime experiences than their unremarkable earlier life. Their lives as he knew them were braced with history; it lent them a solidity, an authority he welcomed.

Over the next hour he tried to justify his omissions, tried to justify what he didn’t fully understand himself, but Juno remained unconvinced.

‘So many sick fixations,’ she said. ‘And I thought you’d moved on.’

Despite his best resolve, Raphe’s attention started to slip again, and within a day or two of their argument his grandfather’s voice had returned stronger than ever, his demands for action infused with a new urgency. This battle was endless; Juno didn’t understand, could never understand. And Raphe had only dwelled on half the story. There was his grandmother, Renate, also murdered, and in evil’s own front parlour. Raphe justified his focus with the Auschwitz aura. Auschwitz was millions, Auschwitz was horror on the grandest scale. Auschwitz was synonymous with mass atrocity, mass murder, mass barbarity. He could leave Auschwitz to humanity. But not the single, one-to-one confrontation which made up the last hours of his grandfather’s life.

Which brought him to justice. If justice had been done, Raphe would not now be wearing the tragedy like a lead-lined vest. But justice wasn’t done, either for the whole Nazi era or specifically for his grandfather. So here he is, a different country, a different hemisphere, on the precipice of a hissing volcano and as fixated as ever on his grandfather and the circumstances of his death. Somebody should pay. Nothing less would let his grandfather rest in peace, nothing less would loosen the grip of Raphe’s own inherited responsibilities. There is Henry Lewin’s son, Daniel, but according to his mother’s account it is Laura who was close to her father, so in Raphe’s imaginings it is Laura who should pay. But how? Raphe is no Nazi and it is not the 1940s any more. How should the daughter pay?

Raphe stares into the crater of the volcano. With so much activity, the sides are falling away. If he were to return in a year or so the crater would be unrecognisable. If only life moved in the same way. Raphe brushes the fine velvety ash off his jacket. The movement makes him think of his grandfather too weak at the end even for this small action. Laura Lewin should suffer her father’s wrongs, Raphe is just not clear how.

In contrast, what is perfectly clear is his failure to live with history. Here he is, a generation removed, and shuffling through his days lugging a great load of hatred and resentment because no one has paid for what happened to his grandfather and all the other millions. Or at least none of the guilty have paid. Plenty of Jewish survivors have paid, he’s seen that first-hand, and their children have paid, and now their grandchildren are paying too. When it will all stop? he wonders as the volcano roars about him. What will make it stop? Not forget, must never forget, but stop the sufferings from being handed further down the line. Even he bears the scars, a man in his forties, not unattractive nor unintelligent, but the longest relationship he’s ever had is with a dog who left him after seven years for a more congenial home a couple of blocks away. There are leavers and leftovers and Raphe sees himself as one of the latter – although not any more, he pleads silently, not after five years and Juno still putting up with him.

It used to be that given all his girlfriends left him sooner or later, he was very careful how attached he became in the first place. Juno had identified this quality early in their relationship. She accused him of living, and loving too, with his gaze pointed in the wrong direction. She said he reminded her of those drivers who spent their time looking in the rear-vision mirror rather than through the front windscreen.

‘They wouldn’t see disaster coming in sequins and tiara,’ she said to him.‘And neither would you.’

‘Someone has to watch over the past,’ he said in his own defence.

Although since learning the truth of his grandfather’s death, Raphe has done considerably more than watch. It’s as if he and his grandfather are connected by a tight leash and Raphe not quite sure who is leading whom. With his gandfather no longer the benign protective presence of his younger years, Raphe has wondered what would happen if he were able to untie the old man and let him go. Would Martin run off, dragging Raphe behind? Or released from his bonds, would the Raphe who remained blossom and flourish? There are times when the force of his grandfather is so intense that all Raphe wants is to step out of the old man’s skin into his own reduced but contemporary life. And is ashamed at the thought.

For whatever resentment Raphe feels, none of it belongs with his innocent grandfather. It is all too clear where the blame lies. Martin Lewin’s life was so brief, cut short by Henry Lewin. Raphe’s own mother was orphaned by Henry Lewin, and Raphe was deprived of the grandfather he always wanted. So much loss and all because of Henry Lewin. It doesn’t matter the man is now dead; the wrong he committed still requires restitution, and it is now up to his descendants to pick up the tab.

As the volcano hisses and steams in front of him, Raphe imagines two people at the edge of a fuming crater. And then only one. Laura Lewin and Raphe Carter go to a volcano and only Raphe returns. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and no evidence to condemn. He is unnerved by his thoughts, but feels no shame.

Over and over he has envisioned it, and again now as the warring couple continue to throttle each other at the edge of the volcano. When the man raises his arm, Raphe finds himself dashing forward to save the wife. But the man’s arm comes to rest across his wife’s shoulders, then he is kissing her and the two of them, all quiet and loving, start back to the boat together. An hour of yelling and screaming in front of one of the natural wonders of the world and now it’s all peace and harmony.

Raphe follows at a distance. His anger has subsided too; he’s beginning to understand what must be done. He moves across the ashen landscape, treading carefully around the steaming cracks. The air quivers, the gases lighten, he breathes more deeply. He has a week before he has to return to work. Juno won’t miss him if he stays away a few days longer. In fact, she’s all spark and wire at the moment, firing off at him at the slightest provocation. And while she’s quick to blame him and his fixations, a book which is dragging its feet as is hers at the moment, does nothing for the mood.

He stops near a craggy slope encrusted with sulphur deposits and picks up a bright lemony lump dusted in a layer of dove-grey ash. He wraps it carefully in a tissue and puts it in the pocket of his jacket. It’s toxic and he registers an odd sort of comfort. As he walks onwards to the rickety jetty, the crushing responsibility he feels for his grandfather becomes more and more manageable.

On the way back to the mainland he keeps to himself, sitting at the back of the boat where he can watch the volcano shrinking on the horizon. He feels calm, he feels inspired, he feels his grandfather’s plaint as a clear and gentle urging, like the press of a lover’s hand between his shoulders. As the volcano grows smaller and smaller, Raphe vows to make amends.

As soon as he arrives back at the hotel, he telephones Juno to let her know he will be staying away an extra week. Then he calls Qantas and arranges a return flight to Melbourne. At last he is ready to meet Laura Lewin.

A Seinfeld Lookalike with a Side in Volcanoes

A
t the Human Rights and Social Justice Commission no one entered the building without a serious encounter with security. But Raphe Carter did. He skirted around the posse of neo-Nazis protesting outside, slipped into the building, sweet-talked the man on the information desk, took the lift to the inner sanctum of offices, and within two minutes of entering the building was standing in the open doorway of Laura Lewin’s office.

It was just after nine. Laura had been at the office since seven trying to finish a report before the day began in earnest. She was in that glazed space of prolonged gazing at her computer when she glanced up and saw a strange man standing in her doorway. He was smiling and uttering her name. She stared at him as if through clouds, then a fraction of a second later her years of training kicked in and she hit the emergency switch.

In the time it took for security to respond, the man with dazzling American fluency explained his business with her. He was in Melbourne for only four days, he said, and needed to speak with a Jew. He had seen her name mentioned in the newspaper that morning, so she seemed an obvious place to start.

‘What about the telephone directory, under Jewish,’ she said.

He was reading the newspaper not the telephone directory, he said. And besides, not any Jew would do. He needed a Jew with clout.

‘A synagogue then. And an authoritative rabbi,’ Laura said, intrigued in spite of herself.

The man shook his head, he wanted results not religion, and would have continued but for the arrival of two security officers. The male officer frisked him, while the female officer checked his passport and other documents. Then each grabbed an arm and were about to escort him from the room and the building when Laura asked them to wait. Not that she needed any more work, but she admired
chutzpah
, something Raphe Carter from San Francisco, California, had in abundance.And she was curious to know what a well-dressed, thirty-something maybe forty, sweet-looking, sweet-talking man wanted from her – or not specifically her, but a ‘Jew with clout’.